Read Spies (2002) for Free Online

earthworks for the transcontinental railway, and that his mother’s worried about whether we’re warm enough out there. ‘You’ll come inside, chaps, won’t you, if you get chilly?’ May still, perhaps. Why aren’t we at school? Perhaps it’s a Saturday or a Sunday. No, there’s the feel of a weekday morning in the air; it’s unmistakable, even if the season isn’t. Something that doesn’t quite fit here, as so often when one tries to assemble different bits to make a whole.
    Or have I got everything back to front? Had the policeman already happened before this?
    It’s so difficult to remember what order things occurred in – but if you can’t remember that , then it’s impossible to work out which led to which, and what the connection was. What I remember, when I examine my memory carefully, isn’t a narrative at all. It’s a collection of vivid particulars. Certain words spoken, certain objects glimpsed. Certain gestures and expressions. Certain moods, certain weathers, certain times of day and states of light. Certain individual moments, which seem to mean so much, but which mean in fact so little until the hidden links between them have been found.
    Where did the policeman come in the story? We watch him as he pedals slowly up the Close. His appearance has simultaneously justified all our suspicions and overtaken all our efforts, because he’s coming to arrest Keith’s mother … No, no – that was earlier. We’re running happily and innocently up the street beside him, and he represents nothing but the hope of a little excitement out of nowhere. He cycles right past all the houses, looking at each of them in turn, goes round the turning circle at the end, cycles back down the street … and dismounts in front of No. 12. What I remember for sure is the look on Keith’s mother’s face, as we run in to tell her that there’s a policeman going to Auntie Dee’s. For a moment all her composure’s gone. She looks ill and frightened. She’s throwing the front door open and not walking but running down the street …
    I understand now, of course, that she and Auntie Dee and Mrs Berrill and the McAfees all lived in dread of policemen and telegraph boys, as everyone did then who had someone in the family away fighting. I’ve forgotten now what it had turned out to be – nothing to do with Uncle Peter, anyway. A complaint about Auntie Dee’s blackout, I think. She was always rather slapdash about it.
    Once again I see that look cross Keith’s mother’s face, and this time I think I see something else beside the fear. Something that reminds me of the look on Keith’s face, when his father’s discovered some dereliction in his duties towards his bicycle or his cricket gear; a suggestion of guilt. Or is memory being overwritten by hindsight once more?
    If the policeman and the look had already happened, could they by any chance have planted the first seed of an idea in Keith’s mind?
    I think now that most probably Keith’s words came out of nowhere, that they were spontaneously created in the moment they were uttered. That they were a blind leap of pure fantasy. Or of pure intuition. Or, like so many things, of both.
    From those six random words, anyway, came everything that followed, brought forth simply by Keith’s uttering them and by my hearing them. The rest of our lives was determined in that one brief moment as the beads clinked against the jug and Keith’s mother walked away from us, through the brightness of the morning, over the last of the fallen white blossom on the red brick path, erect, composed, and invulnerable, and Keith watched her go, with the dreamy look in his eye that I remembered from the start of so many of our projects.
    ‘My mother’, he said reflectively, almost regretfully, ‘is a German spy.’

3
     
     

    So, she’s a German spy.
    How do I react to the news? Do I offer any comment?
    I don’t think I say anything at all. I think I just look at Keith with my mouth